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We are entering a Surrealist phase of personal technology. Any device you might imagine can be found online courtesy of an obscure Chinese factory, ready to be shipped out for a loved one’s holiday enjoyment: pocket-size artificial-intelligence gizmos (Rabbit r1, $199), in-home hologram machines (Code 27 Character Livehouse, $558), human-size robot servants (1X NEO, $20,000). The components of tech have become better and cheaper, from microchips to speakers and screens (have you seen how cheap a good TV is these days?), enabling out-there innovation. On the consumer side, we are bored of rote device designs; we’ve seen a dozen models of iPhone and crave something refreshingly different. Hence the proliferation of gadgets with nonsensical names, promising the same horsepower as major-brand equivalents but with new hardware twists and laughably low prices. We live in the age of the Swype ($18), a “rechargeable disposable” vape with an integrated touch screen on which one can check the weather and get notifications via Bluetooth, mingling nicotine and dopamine hits. Who doesn’t want to find that in the bottom of their stocking? The apps and devices collected here fulfill that old promise of technology: making your life better, or at least more interesting, even if just by encouraging you to log off.

Have More Fun

Enuosuma mini projector 

$49.99

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This past summer, some friends and I rented a house on Fire Island that was bohemian enough to have no television. But there was a toddler in our group who wanted screen time, and the rest of us needed the option to turn our brains off after a long day in the sun. So I bought this mini projector ($50) on Amazon. It’s from a brand called Enuosuma, but that doesn’t matter; there are dozens of alternatives, and they’re all effectively the same. It turned out to be ideal for both Ms Rachel on YouTube and “Michael Clayton” on Apple TV, the picture bright and crisp, with enough adjustability to work on wonky walls. You don’t even have to feed a source into the projector; it connects to Wi-Fi and runs its own apps onboard. What a world!

Nintendo Switch 2 

$449

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You could also use the projector to play a new profusion of portable video games. Nintendo’s recently released Switch 2 ($450) became a hit on top of a hit after the original Switch pioneered the concept that a console can be mobile. The new model upgrades the screen, memory, power, and battery life, and the inaugural games are takes on the classics: Donkey Kong Bananza ($70), Mario Kart World ($80), and Pokémon Legends: Z-A ($70). Nintendo’s not just for kids, but the harder-core gamer might enjoy an updated Steam Deck ($400) for playing PC games on the go. If you don’t know what kinds of games your giftee likes, just buy something like the RetroSnap Play ($70) or the Anbernic RG 40XXV ($53), two in a sketchy range of gadgets that emulate thousands of classic games at once. All of these machines will need power, and batteries have also improved of late. The comparatively tiny Anker Prime Power Bank ($80) will decrease charging anxiety for the whole family.

Healthier Handhelds

BOOX Palma 2 Pro 

$399.99

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Of course, video games aren’t the healthiest forms of content, and who needs more screen time? E-ink is easier on the eyes, not to mention on the brain. The technology has evolved since the first Kindle—no more shuddering screen refreshes. The Daylight DC-1 ($729) is a high-powered, smooth, full-touch-screen computer with its own e-ink-like display and access to apps including Spotify, Slack, and Notion. It’s designed to break tech addictions, and it can be used in bright sunlight, so you can read on a park bench if you want to. The BOOX Palma has consolidated its status as the go-to pocket-size e-ink screen; its latest iteration, the Palma 2 Pro ($400), has full color (think newsprint-level saturation) and runs the Android 15 operating system to replace most of the functions of your smartphone. Even Kindle has a color version now, the Colorsoft ($250), which is ideal for fans of comics and graphic novels. Bibliophiles may still prize print, but there’s something about carrying dozens of books at once, and enjoying a self-illuminating reading experience, that tends to convert even the most committed Luddites.

Anti-Technology Technology

Fujifilm digital camera 

$849

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Still, you might need stronger stuff, or just a passive-aggressive gift for the person in your life who is a little too obsessed with their screen. Nothing says “I would love to have more uninterrupted face-to-face conversations with you” like a gadget that makes someone’s phone less interesting. Brick ($60) is a plastic module containing an app that blocks selected other apps when it comes into contact with a smartphone. Stick it to the fridge and tap it with your phone before and after work, or for the duration of a dog walk or a date; then tap it again to reënable your device. Opal (free, or $100 annually for a “pro” version) does the same thing using only an app; the downside is that it’s easier to disable. I can testify to Opal’s utility: with its help, my screen time and social media use are way down, on weekdays, at least.

Another solution is to supplant your phone’s native features with better ones. The camera app Halide ($60) can remove all of an iPhone’s image processing, A.I., and otherwise, so that your camera produces satisfyingly film-like, more natural-looking digital photographs; it has encouraged me to be more intentional about the snapshots I take on my phone. The Fujifilm X Half digital camera ($845) mimics shooting with a film camera and has a fittingly vintage-style body. If you throw a copy of the tech critic Cory Doctorow’s recent book “Enshittification” ($28) in with the gift, your recipient may read it and become so disgusted with the value extraction that Silicon Valley performs on its users that they will lay off the phone on their own.

Adventures in Streaming

Giving someone a subscription to a new streaming service is a little like buying them a membership to an art museum: it’s a hint that their cultural-consumption habits could stand a little improvement. But don’t think of it as issuing criticism; think of it as lending a passport to adventure. Netflix has become the boring big-box store of video content. As an alternative, give the gift of the Manhattan indie movie theatre Metrograph’s streaming platform ($5 per month), for highly curated art films; or the BBC’s BritBox ($11 per month), for fans of endless bucolic detective dramas; or Crunchyroll ($8 per month), for niche anime. If your loved one is sick of Spotify or has started getting a little too into A.I.-generated music spam, change their lives with Idagio ($10 per month), a classical-music streaming service, or Nugs ($15 per month), a platform for live performances from rock and jam bands.

Avant-Garde Gadgets

Ozlo Sleepbuds 

$299

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There’s no Christmas tradition like unwrapping a technological gift and then spending the rest of the day wrestling to get the thing working. The experience is all the more memorable when the intended function of the device in question is slightly strange or questionable. A startup called Ozlo makes Sleepbuds ($274) (originally designed at Bose), in-ear headphones that are slim enough not to feel uncomfortable when you sleep on your side, perfect for those who can’t stop consuming content even when they’re unconscious. For those who like to stand out and get stares on public transportation, try a folding-screen smartphone like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 ($1,600).

Meta Ray-Ban glasses 

$379

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If your giftee is a fan of both artificial intelligence and blanket digital surveillance (the two go together, really), the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses ($800) have a six-hundred-by-six-hundred-pixel screen integrated into the lenses, a wrist band for reading gesture commands, and a pair of speakers, so that your Meta chatbot can talk back to you. If you’re wearing those, you may as well lean in all the way and buy a straight-up graphics-processing unit, such as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 ($2,000, if you can find one), recommended for running A.I. models at home. Friend ($129) is an A.I.-chatbot companion contained in a circular pendant, worn around the neck, that listens to everything happening around you, then texts you about it. Early reviews suggest that the companion is quite mean—perhaps consider buying a Friend for your frenemy. ♦

On a Friday morning last month, Professor Sir Paul Collier sat watching the proceedings of a community meeting at a sports club in Scunthorpe, a steel town in North Lincolnshire. Collier was dressed exactly like the renowned development economist that he is: comfortable hiking boots, checked shirt, beige slacks, tweed jacket, white beard. For decades, Collier immersed himself in the question of what makes poor countries grow, or fail to grow, mostly in Africa. He ran the research group at the World Bank and wrote papers on foreign aid, civil wars, and corruption. In 2007, his work found a global audience with “The Bottom Billion,” an analysis of why the world’s poorest economies were diverging from, rather than catching up with, more prosperous ones. In the past decade, however, for a combination of personal and political reasons, Collier’s attention has returned to England—particularly its struggling, post-industrial communities, like the one where he grew up. Last year, he published “Left Behind,” which he summarized to me as “a diagnosis of the same bloody problem for poor places in rich countries as for poor countries.”

Collier, who is seventy-six, is more shambling than imposing. But when he speaks, and especially when he writes, he is forceful and impatient, like someone who fears that his ideas are running out of time. “Divergence breeds despair—and despair breeds anger,” he writes, in “Left Behind.” By his own admission, Collier’s mind operates at a certain altitude: he thinks in terms of demographics and decades, as opposed to news cycles. In 2015, he was criticized for using the word “indigenous” to describe Britain’s white population, in the context of immigration. Collier often says that the ultra-rational “homo economicus” of traditional economics does not exist. But he can sometimes sound like one.

Collier was in Scunthorpe to attend a meeting of Scunthorpe Tomorrow, a coalition of local volunteers that formed two and a half years ago to, in the group’s words, “change the narrative about what is possible” in the town. Scunthorpe typically makes the news in connection to some crisis at the steelworks. (This spring, the British government took control of the plant, after its Chinese owners threatened to shut it down.) The town fits the profile of other places that Collier identifies as “spiralling down.” In June, the government named Scunthorpe one of Britain’s seventy-five most left-behind communities, owing to a combination of poverty, poor health, and low productivity. Scunthorpe Tomorrow had invited residents to a series of workshops to discuss how to spend a new twenty-million-pound grant from the state that is intended to fix these problems.

Each table in the club bar had a large piece of paper, on which participants were invited to describe their visions for Scunthorpe and its present situation. Sample comments: “No one wants to own the problems”; “nowhere for the kids to go”; “self-deprecation of the area.” In one corner of the room, an artist named Rebecca Ellis was working on a mural, to illustrate more positive ideas. Ellis had painted the words “Youth Clubs” in large crimson letters, along with a futuristic bus and a street-food zone. The steelworks, a two-thousand-acre site dominating Scunthorpe’s eastern side, was depicted as a windowless brick box.

Collier joined in at a table that included a local vicar. He has to be careful not to say too much. “You’ve got to have a modest role, you know,” he told me. “I’ve not got all the answers, but I can suggest things.” In the nineties, after the Rwandan genocide, Collier helped advise the government on how to rebuild its economy. His experiences in Rwanda—along with his analyses of post-independence Tanzania and Singapore, and of Deng Xiaoping’s China—can give Collier’s prescriptions a bracing edge. In “Left Behind,” he doesn’t argue that autocracy can be more effective than democracy in raising people’s living standards in post-conflict situations, but he doesn’t argue the opposite, either. “Critics need to find other leadership teams in comparable situations which did better,” he writes. “They won’t find them in Burundi.”

Collier calls himself a centrist, but his politics are of the left. He is an enthusiastic proponent of the philosopher Michael Sandel’s idea of “contributive justice”—that everyone in a society, including the weak, must have agency in order to contribute to and define the common good. But a lifetime of development studies has also made Collier skeptical of clever bureaucrats and virtuous intentions. He urges self-sacrifice by leaders and experimentation in the face of complex problems. Collier tries to offer what he calls credible hope, but he acknowledges that this can be hard to come by. One of the co-founders of Scunthorpe Tomorrow is Robert Allen, a former civil servant at the Treasury, who grew up caring for his disabled father in the town. “We’re starting to realize that, as Paul would sort of put it, no one’s going to come and save us,” Allen told me.

Scunthorpe’s town crest includes a heraldic emblem of a “Blast-Furnace issuant therefrom Flames all proper.” In the nineteen-sixties, the town’s four blast furnaces, each named after a Queen of England, were the centerpiece of the British steel industry, which was the second largest in Europe, after West Germany’s. Scunthorpe was advanced and aspirational—an industrial garden town—with wide roads, good jobs, and plenty of parks.

But the past forty years have been extremely cruel. Margaret Thatcher’s free-market reforms triggered an economic shock from which the town has yet to recover. The steelworks remains in operation, but employs a quarter of the people it once did. The rest of the town, which sits on a ridge, not far from the North Sea, has a health problem, a crime problem, and a skills problem. It even has a name problem. In the early days of the internet, a “Scunthorpe problem” occurred when a word, like “Scunthorpe,” contained another word, like “cunt,” that meant it got blocked by profanity filters. I have reported from Scunthorpe a number of times in the past ten years, and it is a place longing for its stages of grief to end. The website of Heslam Park, where the community meeting was held, displays its support for the three clubs that use its facilities: the rugby club, the cricket club, and Tackling It Together, an initiative that aims to reduce male suicide in the town.

Each table at the meeting suggested ideas for how to spend the money on offer from the national government to improve Scunthorpe. Most of the proposals were sensible but small-scale: clearing rubbish, improving the parks, reimagining the libraries. Then it was Collier’s turn to speak. He took the microphone and stood, slightly stooped, in the middle of the room. He is not a fluent orator, but he has a gruff magnetism. He praised the energy of the discussion. “That’s your future,” Collier said. “It’s your own energy, right?”

He was doubtful about the ostensible purpose of the discussion: how to distribute the twenty million pounds of national funding. Scunthorpe has a population of eighty thousand people. The money would be paid over ten years. Collier pointed out that this amounted to one cup of coffee a month per adult resident—at Scunthorpe, rather than London, prices. “That’s not going to transform anybody’s life,” Collier said. “But you thinking about ‘What can we do together?’ That will transform.” He ignored the residents’ suggestions and urged them to think more ambitiously, about the kind of work that might keep young people in the town. “There are jobs here,” Collier said. “But they’re crap jobs, warehouse jobs in Amazon, that sort of rubbish.” Quiet, stunned laughter filled the room. “You need jobs that are interesting, worth doing. Where are those interesting, worthwhile jobs in the future going to come from? Well, we don’t know.”

Part of Collier’s role in places like Scunthorpe is to say the unsayable. “He will challenge in, like, really blunt terms,” Allen told me. “And that’s really, really valuable, because we’re all really close to it.” Collier’s idea for what to do with the government money was to start clearing disused parts of the steelworks, in order to make way for a new business park for local entrepreneurs. “Instead of drinking one cup of coffee extra a month for the next ten years, clear that site,” Collier said. “And make it work with your own brilliant talent.” Collier’s boldness was informed, at least in part, by necessity. “You can see the forces,” he confided later. “The steel company’s going to close. The Treasury has got no money to fund it for very long.”

After Collier spoke, the meeting took on a looser feel. Jonathan Frary, another Scunthorpe Tomorrow volunteer, stood up to close the session. Frary is a former triathlete who runs Curly’s Athletes, a sporting-events business in the town. He spent seven years in London, working in H.R., before returning to Scunthorpe. It was difficult to talk about his home town when he lived away from it. “Most people just said, ‘I bet you are glad to be out,’ ” Frary said. “You kind of carry that with you.”

When Collier visits Scunthorpe, Frary likes to give him a lift in his truck and collar him for big-picture conversations about A.I. and the evolution of humanity. He says that the economist’s message is always the same: “You can’t rely on what you already know.” In the bar at Heslam Park, Frary channelled Collier as he exhorted the residents. “Make a start. Doesn’t have to be right. Doesn’t have to be a project,” he said. “It’s a journey. Just do something and find other people that are passionate about doing it. So, go do shit.”

Collier grew up in Sheffield, a steel city in South Yorkshire, about an hour west of Scunthorpe, after the Second World War. His parents, who ran a butcher’s shop, left school when they were twelve. Collier won a place at a grammar school and then at Oxford. He never really looked back. Between 1970, when Collier was twenty-one, and last year, employment in the British steel industry shrank by ninety per cent. People in Sheffield and South Yorkshire suffered just as badly as those in Scunthorpe, if not worse. The Colliers were not immune. “My family back in Sheffield is bimodal,” he said. “Two of us have been really successful, and quite a few who are just total disasters.”

Two of Collier’s young relatives from Sheffield—the grandchildren of his first cousin—were taken away from their parents. In 2008, Collier and his wife, Pauline, who had a young son of their own at the time, became the children’s guardians and brought them to live in Oxford. “We took them when they were nearly two and nearly three,” Collier recalled. “By which time they were already totally emotionally traumatized.”

Collier was deeply engaged with international poverty research at the time. He had returned to teaching, from the World Bank.“The Bottom Billion” had been published the previous year. It struck him that his African friends and colleagues thought that it was perfectly natural for him to take care of his less fortunate relatives, whereas the British response—expressed in undue bureaucracy and raised eyebrows—made him feel eccentric. “It was excruciating, shaming . . . forty pages of questionnaires. ‘Do you unplug your electric plugs every night?’ ” he told an interviewer, in 2018. “At no stage did anybody actually ask whether we were decent human beings who would love these little children.”

Bringing up the children, as well as his own son, made Collier reflect on the fate of his wider family and home city. Sheffield now has some of the poorest neighborhoods in the U.K. After the Brexit vote, Collier decided to study the country’s regional inequality directly. In his book “The Future of Capitalism,” published in 2018, he reflected on three growing divides: within Britain’s borders; between those with higher and lower levels of education; and globally, between the richest and poorest countries on earth. “My own life has straddled each of the three grim rifts that have opened in our societies,” he writes. “While I have maintained a cool head, they have seared my heart.”

Britain’s imbalanced economy is one of its greatest sores. When the country was still in the E.U., its seven poorest regions were poorer than anywhere in France, Germany, or Ireland. The size of the economy of Yorkshire and the Humber, of which Scunthorpe and Sheffield are both part, has more in common with Lithuania than with London. When Allen, of Scunthorpe Tomorrow, first saw the capital, in his late teens, he felt as if he was visiting a different country. “I feel that more keenly now, twenty years on, than I did as a nineteen-year-old,” he said. In 2021, Collier started advising northern towns and cities—starting with Sheffield—on how they might begin to turn their fortunes around.

Boris Johnson was Prime Minister at the time. A policy called Levelling Up was one of Johnson’s favorites, a mission “to end the geographical inequality which is such a striking feature of the U.K.,” as his government called it. Levelling Up had its own government department. (Collier was hired briefly as an adviser). But like most Johnsonian notions—building a bridge to Ireland, or an airport on an island in the Thames—Levelling Up turned out to be more of a talking point than a serious investment program. Johnson’s unflamboyant eventual successor, Rishi Sunak, cancelled the northern leg ofHS2, a multibillion-pound high-speed railway network that was supposed to knit the country together.

Collier was briefly optimistic that the new Labour government would take the challenge more seriously. “Keir Starmer has done enough to be given the benefit of the doubt,” he wrote, last summer. But, like many people, Collier has been baffled by Labour’s incompetence and sense of drift. For years, Collier’s basic critique of the British state has been that it is far too centralized, politically and culturally, in London, and that the Treasury, which controls government spending, has a narrow and reductive approach to how it views investment.

None of that has changed. Except that Starmer and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, who represents a constituency in Leeds, are now much less popular than when they won office. “They realize they’re failing,” Collier said. Last December, Labour announced reforms to local government that will abolish and merge hundreds of smaller councils into larger, more powerful units—a plan that Collier thinks will make matters even worse. “If you diagnose that we’re failing because we don’t have enough control, we need to have more centralization,” he said. “That’s what they’re doing.”

Collier insists that his work is nonideological. But that doesn’t mean it is not political. Six months ago, Lincolnshire elected its first regional mayor, from Nigel Farage’s nationalist Reform U.K. Party. Scunthorpe itself—which has a Labour M.P. but voted overwhelmingly for Brexit—will be a target for Reform at the next election. “Consider two futures: one where all the places like Scunthorpe—working-class—all around England fail,” Collier told me. “Politically, what’s going to happen? Well, we know what will happen. The place will explode. It will explode into despair and anger, and we know where both of those lead.” Allen told me that he saw the previous decade of voting in the town as a series of increasingly desperate choices. “I think it’s really hard to predict with certainty how the next few years are going to play out,” he said.

After the roundtable with residents, the volunteers in Scunthorpe withdrew to a smaller room at the sports club to discuss their progress. A representative from the University Campus of North Lincolnshire, which opened in the town in 2019, suggested an A.I. tool to match students with local mentors and career opportunities. Frary, the former triathlete, offered to host Scunthorpe’s first Soup—a community event where entrepreneurs pitched small-scale business ideas—inspired by regeneration efforts in Detroit. Collier interjected now and then, to emphasize the importance, and the value, of vocational trades, like bricklaying.

Afterward, we took a tour of the university campus. Collier was impressed by the equipment in a robotics laboratory and the fact that there was barely anybody in the building at three o’clock in the afternoon. “It’s like a neutron bomb has hit it,” he muttered. Back in Oxford, the following week, Collier acknowledged both the immense difficulty of reviving places like Scunthorpe and the absolute necessity of doing so. “If it has to work, and you’re not confident that it will, what do you do?” he asked. “You start, and you learn as you go.” A copy of the Spanish edition of “Left Behind” was on the table between us. Collier quoted Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, who is credited with saving the euro during the depths of the financial crisis. “Whatever it takes,” Collier said. “It’s that attitude that is exactly right: whatever it takes to make provincial England work again.” He liked the phrase, so he said it again, this time as a slogan: “Make Provincial England Work Again.” ♦

In the nineteen-thirties and forties, young book critics on the make used to crowd outside the office of Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic, in the hopes of his attention. Cowley—who had established himself as the historian of the Lost Generation par excellence with “Exile’s Return,” a memoir of living in France alongside the not-yet-famous writers Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among others—was undeniably one of the few men in American letters who defined the taste of the reading public. He could help a struggling writer keep the lights on, or, even better, anoint them. The sad young literary men and women he plucked from the crowd were thus invited into the ranks of the country’s tastemakers.

Determining what the nation did and did not read was the through line of Cowley’s career. He was a great discoverer and nurturer of talent: Jack Kerouac, John Cheever, and Ken Kesey were among the writers he championed, and, of the critics he commissioned to produce reviews at The New Republic, many—including Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Trilling, and Muriel Rukeyser—would go on to have storied careers. By midlife, Cowley was esteemed as an editor and essayist, a nimble translator of contemporary French literature, and a creative-writing instructor at Stanford. He was also a canny industry operator—a man who knew how to play the different parts of the publishing machine against one another in the interests of work he wanted to promote. His most cited act of heroism may have been his effort to revitalize the career of William Faulkner, who had slipped into obscurity after the Second World War, by publishing an influential edition of his work while at Viking Press, but he also kept fires lit for Walt Whitman, Nathanael West, Sherwood Anderson, and his close friend Hart Crane. (Broom, a short-lived magazine that Cowley helped edit, published Crane alongside the likes of Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens.)

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In a 1963 issue of Esquire, a tart article called “The Structure of the Literary Establishment” found Cowley to be near “The Hot Center” of power. Gerald Howard’s new biography, “The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature” (Penguin Press), zooms in on Cowley’s place at that center, tracing his involvement with “just about everything and everybody of literary consequence” during what we now call the American century. Howard does more than highlight the ways in which—through the recommendation of residency recipients, the publication of essays and books, the mentoring of students, or the revival of out-of-print works—Cowley shaped individual literary careers. Rather, as Howard, a former book editor himself, sees it, Cowley’s agitation for the cause of his country’s literature also helped to vault what was once seen as a minor, regional tradition into a world-historical one. Cowley’s life story demonstrates not just how reputations are built (and destroyed) but also how “one determined actor” managed to bend an entire canon “to his tastes and convictions.”

When Cowley was born, at the end of the nineteenth century, American literature was widely considered a sideshow act. Mark Twain may have been one of the century’s most famous men, but the prevailing sentiment was nevertheless to deem his country’s literature “provincial, backward, lacking in artistic polish or value,” Howard writes. Anxiety surrounding the nation’s cultural marginality was widespread. Surveying the last century or two of American literary output, one saw a fragmented corpus that reflected a nation more easily understood region by region than as a whole.

In April, 1917, in the middle of his undergraduate studies, at Harvard, Cowley sailed to Paris to volunteer in the war effort, following in the footsteps of his classmates John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. Working as a driver on the front, he was somewhat insulated from the horrors of the trench, but he witnessed the carnage a mortar shell could inflict. His time in France ended in the fall, and he was back in the states by November. When he landed in New York, he decided to continue his “long forlough”—away from school and from gentility—in Greenwich Village. From this point on, he would be closely attached to the cultural life of downtown bohemia, socializing with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Dorothy Day. (In 1919, he returned briefly to Harvard, obtaining his degree the next year.) Some of the most entertaining scenes of Howard’s biography recount this intense period, when Cowley decided, somewhat unwisely, that the most direct path to influence was freelance book reviewing. He was perpetually broke, and when he wasn’t panhandling for review assignments from editors or pawning review copies (and, in one dire instance, his Phi Beta Kappa ring), he would occasionally work as an extra in an O’Neill play. By his early twenties, his byline regularly appeared in well-regarded publications, and while much of this work was humdrum, according to Howard, one gets a sense from the writers he engaged with—Katherine Mansfield, Amy Lowell, and Marcel Proust among them—of Cowley as someone caught between the magic of European modernism and the earthier American tradition.

From the beginning of his public life as an intellectual, Cowley would be preoccupied with questions about, as he put it, the “clusters” and “constellations” that distinguish one cohort from another, and how one might unite the disparate strands of American literature into an identifiable movement. These concerns would come to the fore in an essay he published in 1921, at twenty-three, shortly after he won a scholarship to pursue graduate studies in France, where many of his peers had moved to escape a souring national mood and the spectres of Prohibition and the Palmer Raids.

“This Youngest Generation,” which appeared in the New York Evening Post, contains observations that Cowley would refine for the rest of his life. It crystallized what Howard calls his “most persuasive insight”: “that the American writers who were coming of age in the postwar years, particularly those who’d chosen to expatriate themselves to Europe, constituted a literary group distinct from the generations that had come before.” Cowley knew that the Great War’s shadow was inescapable, and while this insight was hardly original (as Virginia Woolf wrote, more famously, “on or about December 1910 human nature changed”), he was uniquely sensitive to the ways in which that shadow impressed itself on the writing of his contemporaries. The essay was not rosy or complimentary; he knew that his peers had not written anything of note—yet. But what made the Americans in Europe distinct from their forebears, he argued, was that they wrote of the American experience as a global condition. Their misspent years on the Left Bank, or in the trenches of the French countryside, revealed to them their home’s entanglement with the affairs of the world. They invited, more than others before them, an exchange of ideas with the Continent, and also desired to reinvent American writing along these lines.

In 1934, Cowley would expand his essay’s ideas in his best and most meaningful book, “Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s,” which documents how his cohort forged a literature in the crucible of national disaffection, war, and exile. It’s a remarkable and unusual work—alternating between first and second person, its account is at once intimate and general. The book’s sociological rendering draws heavily on personal material, like Cowley’s memories of hanging out in cafés and bars in Montparnasse and the Village, or watching Hart Crane drunkenly compose poetry, or procuring stamps for an ashen James Joyce. Cowley presents as a Joe Schmo who has miraculously appeared at the right place at the right time. But it also has a definite thesis: Cowley’s contemporaries were the “first real” generation in “the history of American letters,” because its members “belonged to a period of transition from values already fixed to values that had to be created”—one that reflected their “common adventures,” and a “common attitude” of longing and alienation from parochial, middle-class life (and art) in America. He saw the writers among whom he dwelled as creating a “new literature” modelled after French influences, such as Flaubert, while “extending in different combinations through the work of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Stephen Crane.” The Lost Generation looked back at “a tradition that had been broken for a time,” and reëstablished it, by fusing modern influences from Europe.

“Exile’s Return” ’s more riveting passages feature Cowley writing, with a refreshing frankness, on the giants in his midst, and also the Dada rabble-rousers he befriended in Paris. The early European modernists had built monuments to their mastery of the novel, but these works were flawed by their limited appeal for readers who couldn’t untangle their webs of references or submit to their works’ overwhelming need for attention. Joyce possessed an “intolerable genius”; Proust, in writing “In Search of Lost Time,” had “turned himself inside out like an orange and sucked it dry.” What the young Americans offered was writing that, unlike these forebears, could better reflect the feeling of living in the present, and could also, by avoiding the seductive but stultifying impulse to turn art-making intensely inward, be legible to those outside what Cowley called “the religion of art.”

“Exile’s Return” appeared in the fifth year of the Depression, a time when Cowley’s circle was becoming increasingly radicalized. Many had joined the Communist Party or were, like him, fellow-travellers who felt it was their duty to join hands with the working class. As Cowley proclaimed in a letter to the poet Allen Tate, “The conception of the class struggle is one that renders the world intelligible and tragic . . . a world possible to write about once more in the grand manner.” He threw himself into political activity, lending his name to open letters and visiting some of the fronts of class conflict, from miners’ strikes in Kentucky to the streets of Barcelona in the middle of the Civil War. But he was not the most adept political observer, and his star would briefly implode when he picked the wrong side of the debate that would tear apart the left, the battle between Trotsky and Stalin. Among other things, Cowley wrote a piece for the New Republic about the Moscow show trials that, according to Kazin, “condemned” the defendants. A letter he received from Edmund Wilson, his predecessor at The New Republic, in 1938 best sums up how many felt about Cowley by the end of the decade: “What in God’s name has happened to you?”

By the start of the Second World War, it was possible that politics would truly ruin Cowley’s life: he was hounded in the press, lost many friends and jobs, and was even targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Cowley was left, for a time, immiserated, resorting to hunting squirrels on the grounds of his house, in Sherman, Connecticut, to feed his family.

But then he began inching his way back up to the highest precincts of American letters. His first lifeline was an assignment to profile the editor Maxwell Perkins, for this magazine, in 1944. Perkins was responsible for helping to introduce Cowley’s compatriots (most famously, Fitzgerald) to the American public. In a way, he was the blueprint for what Cowley would become in the following years, when he disavowed formal politics and fully committed himself to a no-less-ideological enterprise: the promotion of modern American writing.

In 1944, in a deus-ex-machina-like turn, Cowley was awarded a five-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, money that allowed him to chart a new course. Until then, as a magazine editor and a freelance writer, he had been chained to the hamster wheel of the publishing calendar. With no deadlines, he was able to reinvent himself as a literary historian. He began working as a talent scout and a consulting editor at Viking, which invited him to help edit their “Portable” books—an influential paperback series of introductory collections of major authors’ works. Like many domestic industries, publishing was flush with resources, shored up by the wartime economy. In every G.I.’s rucksack, nestled between rations, were novels.

Cowley’s tenure at Viking produced what is arguably the most lastingly consequential of his editorial efforts: collecting and reprinting a number of Faulkner’s most significant pieces of writing, and, in the process, creating a more complete picture of his corpus for historians and academics to debate. His success was by no means predictable. After the war, Faulkner was an unlikely candidate for canonization. His books were out of print. While he was never an obscure writer, he was not roundly celebrated, either. Maxwell Perkins himself had told Cowley, “Faulkner is finished.”

Across Howard’s biography, a routine plays itself out: Cowley decides that a figure, whether it is a forgotten writer or an unproven one, deserves more attention, and he mobilizes. Viking rebuffed Cowley’s idea at first, but then he got to writing, placing two essays about Faulkner in important magazines. It was enough to convince the publisher that “a flurry of highly positive critical activity” was unfolding. The project was green-lighted. In “The Portable Faulkner,” Cowley proffers an interpretation which would become the standard, one that elevated Faulkner from a Southern-gothic writer into a key player in American modernism. Less than a decade after the collection appeared, Faulkner would receive a Nobel Prize, and he would say, “I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay.”

The impression produced by Howard’s biography is of Cowley as a Zelig-like character present at every important moment in American literary life. Yet for a man who so intimately understood how to build a reputation, his own standing suffered greatly in the years after his death, in 1989. His politics are certainly one reason. And, though the political currents that all but sank him have evolved, they have not done so in ways conducive to a Cowley revival. In 2014, shortly after the publication of his letters, the volume’s editor, the scholar Hans Bak, speculated that Cowley’s obscurity might owe to the so-called canon wars of the nineties, in which academics tussled over the diversity of college syllabi, which skewed toward the dusty tradition of “Great Books.” Cowley, Bak said, “had constructed a canon of American literature dominated by white male writers . . . an entire image of the story of American literature which has sort of been subverted.”

The writer Susan Cheever, who knew Cowley through her father, John—whom Cowley picked out of the slush pile—thinks that Cowley was forgotten simply because most editors are. They aren’t the stars, after all. Editors may be invoked in acknowledgement pages or awards speeches, but they don’t much inhabit the public imagination of literary life.

Still, not all editors have—or are able to take on—the task Cowley gave himself: to believe so earnestly and powerfully in the work of his peers that he spent his life making sure they would not be forgotten. That his work can be boiled down into a reading list traversed without enthusiasm by most high-school seniors is hardly his fault. If anything, “Exile’s Return” is a book that belongs on those lists, too. That book is a skeleton key that unlocks a sense of how much work was required in order for a generation to agitate for their own writing. If Cowley stood for anything, it was the idea that a national literature could not exist without the toil of true believers who committed themselves, regardless of the caprices of sales or critical reception, to bettering their countrymen through good books. ♦

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On Tuesday, President Trump fêted Saudi Arabia’s leader, Mohammed bin Salman, at the White House, a symbol of the remarkable reputational turnaround that bin Salman, who is known as M.B.S., has managed in the past seven years. After a military flyover and a red-carpet greeting, Trump praised M.B.S. as a “very good friend”; the day before, he promised to sell F-35 jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns that doing so could lead to China gaining access to the technology.

When M.B.S. ascended to power in 2017, he was lauded by some analysts as a reformer. His international standing crashed the following year, after the assassination of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi government. (In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump raged at a reporter who asked a question about Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman,” Trump said. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”) When President Joe Biden took office, in 2021, he released a report on Khashoggi’s murder which concluded that it had been carried out on M.B.S.’s orders. But, over time, M.B.S. was reëmbraced by Washington. In the past several years, the Saudi government has invested in Western sports, including soccer, golf, and cricket, and M.B.S. has embarked domestically on a wide-ranging effort to loosen legal and social restrictions on women, while at the same time cracking down on dissent, imprisoning political rivals, and ramping up executions, many of which were carried out on foreign migrant workers charged with drug crimes.

To talk about the Saudi-American relationship, I recently spoke by phone with F. Gregory Gause, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute, in Washington, D.C., and a professor emeritus at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A. & M. University. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how Saudi Arabia won over Washington again, how Trump mixes business and politics in the Middle East, and what M.B.S. really wants to achieve within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

How would you describe the American-Saudi relationship today?

Extremely close. I think that it’s probably closer than it’s been for the past fifteen years. It is very coöperative and sustained, and not only by state-to-state interests, but also by the interests of President Trump’s family and its business in the region.

I want to take a step back to 2018. Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, and M.B.S.’s reputation was extremely low in Washington. There was what felt like an unprecedented push against him, considering the history of the tight-knit American relationship to Saudi Arabia. And here we are, seven years later. How do you understand what changed, and why?

The first thing that changed is that the Biden Administration, which was really the first American Administration to come into office seeking to distance the United States from Saudi Arabia, found out at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, that it still had a real interest in having a good relationship with the largest exporter of oil in the world. I think that in the United States, there was a belief that we didn’t need Saudi Arabia anymore. This was more on the Democratic side than the Republican side, but I think it was a somewhat bipartisan idea: we didn’t need Saudi Arabia anymore because we were the largest oil producer in the world, and we were going to transition to green energy anyway. And, moreover, the Saudis were just not as central to the world energy markets as they had been in the past. I think all of that proved, at least in the short term, not to be true.

Why?

The fact that we are the largest oil producer in the world does not mean that we are immune from what happens in the larger world energy markets. When I lived in Texas, my neighbors weren’t going to give everybody else in America a lower price than they could get on the international market because they loved us so much. Oil is a world market and it’s got a world price, and in that sense energy independence was an illusion.

There has been a push by the Saudi government to get involved in sports and other areas of the American economy—so-called “sportswashing,” etc. The Biden Administration hoped for a normalization agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which would have included the recognition of a Palestinian state by Israel in exchange for the establishment of diplomatic and economic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and perhaps some sort of nuclear deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia, too. How crucial were these factors to Biden reëmbracing M.B.S.?

Every dollar that the Saudis have spent on public-relations efforts in the United States, and every dollar they’ve spent on sports, if in fact that money was meant to improve the country’s image in the West, was wasted. I can understand the investment in sports as a potential moneymaker down the line, but I never thought that the sportswashing argument was particularly potent. I think that the Biden Administration shifted on Saudi Arabia when Russia invaded Ukraine and the world energy markets were put topsy-turvy. It was only after that that the Biden Administration started thinking about the triangular deal between itself, Saudi Arabia, and a Senate-ratified security treaty in exchange for Saudi normalization with Israel.

The former ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Biden Administration, Michael Ratney, made the argument in the Wall Street Journal recently that the investments in sports weren’t really about improving M.B.S.’s image in the West, but instead about making Saudi Arabia more of a normal country. This struck me as a little far-fetched. But you seem to be saying that, regardless of what the motives were, paying comedians to come to Riyadh or spending on American sports leagues has failed as an image-improvement strategy, and is somewhat separate from Saudi Arabia’s improved relationship with Washington.

The sports spending can be more than one thing. I think that the crown prince is a sports nut and very interested in global sport, both e-sport and normal sport. And he thought that these were good investments. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I think LIV Golf might not be a great investment, but it was more than just a P.R. effort. He thought of it as a way to both make money in the long term and to make Saudi Arabia a more normal place. Some of the sports investments have been better than others. The investments in Newcastle FC in the Premier League seem to be pretty good. The Formula One stuff that they’re doing locally, I assume, brings in some amount of tourism, although I haven’t seen figures on that. So the whole sports campaign can be more than one thing. But if it was primarily aimed at improving Saudi Arabia’s public-opinion profile in the United States, then it was wasted money. I don’t think it has made a dent in the generally negative opinion most Americans have about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

It seems like you’re describing the Biden relationship with Saudi Arabia as being more about these large economic factors. Dare I say that the Trump Administration’s embrace of M.B.S. might have to do with more personal economic matters, that Trump didn’t care about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the first place, and was annoyed by all the talk of punishing Saudi Arabia in his first term? And how do you understand the Trump relationship with M.B.S. now?

I don’t think it’s any different than President Trump’s policy in the first term. It’s the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks. It’s because that’s where the money is. I think President Trump, even more baldly in his second term, sees the difference between his own economic interest and the country’s economic interest as, in effect, inseparable. And that’s troublesome to me as an American citizen, but it’s certainly something that the Saudis understand because all those monarchies in the Persian Gulf region have been a combination of business interests and political interests forever, whether it’s oil or, in the pre-oil period, money from pearl diving. All of these ruling families have been part of the business environment in their countries. And so, in many ways, Saudi Arabia sees the Trump Administration as the first American government that it really understands because it’s not dissimilar to the way they view the intersection of politics and business. When Trump sent Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, to be his primary go-between with Saudi Arabia in the first term, I’m sure the Saudis understood.

It has been commonly assumed that M.B.S. wants to turn the country from a sort of strange religious dictatorship into a more banal, repressive dictatorship. Do you think that’s the way that we should understand what he’s been trying to do? I keep thinking that this is best evoked by the fact that he has been relaxing some laws that restricted women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, while at the same time throwing women’s-rights advocates in jail because he’s a dictator who wants to have political control.

The word that best describes what he wants is one that he’s used, which is that he wants Saudi Arabia to be a normal country. In the sense of the political system, he wants it to be a normal authoritarian country, i.e., a place where people can enjoy some amount of social freedom. And, on that score, he has really changed the country dramatically. I mean, not just the women driving and the women’s rights, but the availability of public entertainment, the mixing of the genders in public places, and the access women have to job opportunities in the public sphere. He thinks of that as a more normal country, and I think most Americans would probably think of that as a more normal country, but he has absolutely no desire to change the political system. In fact, he wants to recentralize power not just in the ruling family but in him personally within the family.

That’s been a big change. For decades, Saudi Arabia was basically run as a committee system, a committee of senior princes that had to sign on to anything important that was happening, and it had all the defects of committees. It was stodgy, it didn’t seize opportunities. But it had the virtue of committees, too, which is to say that they didn’t do anything spectacularly dumb. He has changed that committee system to an individual system, so sometimes they do dumb things, and he did a number of dumb things early on in the period in which he was the main decision-maker, including the war in Yemen, the blockade of Qatar, which was meant to end its support for Islamist groups, and the kidnapping of the Lebanese Prime Minister. This was a misbegotten effort to create a crisis in Lebanon, which M.B.S. thought would harm Hezbollah, but actually harmed Hezbollah’s opponents, such as the Lebanese Prime Minister himself, Saad Hariri. And the Jamal Khashoggi killing, as well. There’s been some learning from that. He’s been much more cautious on the foreign-policy scene, and I think that, with his consolidation of power, he’s not about to give that up for some kind of democratic reform.

It’s a nice time for him in that sense because he isn’t going to get many lectures about democratic reform.

From this Administration, no. He’s certainly not going to get any lectures. I think this trip is kind of a personal triumph for him. If he had come five years ago, nobody would have been talking to him.

You mentioned his foreign policy, and it seemed in the early years that he was meddling in Lebanon and Yemen and Qatar, and there was also a very aggressive posture toward the Iranians. How do you see the posture in the region now, and what have you made of the way he’s dealt with Gaza? My sense is that it seems like he’d probably love to have some sort of deal with Israel, but knows that he can’t get too far ahead of the Saudi population, which I imagine is not pleased about Israel’s conduct in Gaza.

The Gaza war has decreased the salience of the Iranian threat for Saudi Arabia and increased the costs of normalization with Israel. The Saudis have been very public about this since October 7th, that they need some kind of road map from the Israelis for a movement toward Palestinian statehood for them to consider normalization, and that’s upping the ante from what it was before October 7th. That’s a reflection of public opinion in Saudi Arabia, even if this is not a regime whose foreign policy is determined by public opinion. And it is also about regional opinion. I think M.B.S. sees himself not just as the leader of Saudi Arabia, but also a regional leader, and he’s not going to get too far in front of Arab and Muslim public opinion for which the Palestinians are now much more salient than they were before October 7th. Now, that doesn’t mean that normalization with Israel is off the agenda, but it’s certainly off the agenda in the near term.

What about in terms of his behavior in the region more broadly?

Yemen was a huge setback. He thought that would be a relatively easy win, and it turned out to be a morass just like it’s been for everyone else who’s tried to intervene militarily in Yemen. Even the Ottomans had a terrible time. Nasser in Egypt had a terrible time in the sixties, and even the U.S. took on the Houthis for a while and then decided we didn’t want to anymore. And the Qatar boycott was a failure. The Lebanon intervention was a failure, and the blowback from the killing of Jamal Khashoggi was, to quote the old French phrase, worse than a crime, it was an error. So, I think he’s learned to be more cautious. I also suspect that he had a fundamental rethink. I don’t know the guy, but in September of 2019, when the Iranians struck major Saudi oil facilities and the Trump Administration did nothing in response, I think that that was a real wake-up call. [Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen took responsibility for the attack, but it is now believed to have been carried out from either Iran or Southern Iraq by Iranian forces or militias.] And instead of then following the Trump Administration’s otherwise very muscular approach toward Iran, they decided to compose their differences with Iran. Not that they like the Iranians—they still mistrust them, but if you can’t count on the U.S. to back you up, you’re going to be a lot more cautious.

And you think that caution is likely to continue despite the fact that Trump helped Israel bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities, and Israel has been so aggressive against the Iranians, especially since the war in Gaza began?

I think that the Saudis are worried about Israeli aggressiveness when it includes air strikes on Gulf monarchies, as happened in Qatar. There’s increased worry about Israeli ambitions in the region and decreased worries, although not the elimination of worries, about Iranian ambitions. There’s just a lot more caution. There’s caution about U.S. reliability. M.B.S. wanted to have a Senate-ratified treaty on defense issues with the United States, and that’s what the Biden Administration was holding out on. He’s not going to get that from the Trump Administration. They can’t get anything through the Senate. But he wants a formal security agreement with the Trump Administration to avoid what happened in September of 2019 when President Trump didn’t react to the Iranian attack.

You have explained why the Biden and Trump Administrations have reëmbraced M.B.S., but what about the larger foreign-policy community in Washington? It’s fair to say they have too, no?

It is certainly a fair characterization. There is a general sense among the so-called foreign-policy Blob that he is doing things that “we” like, such as turning Saudi Arabia away from harsh interpretations of Islam, and that he is someone you have to deal with.

What is the Saudi-U.A.E. relationship like at this point? It seemed quite close for a while. Is it still?

There’s a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. in certain respects, particularly regarding being the business center of the Gulf. The Saudis would like to poach on Dubai, which is the place where everybody basically sets up their corporate regional headquarters. The Saudis have adopted policies that basically say you can’t get a Saudi government contract unless your regional headquarters is in Riyadh. So there’s some amount of business rivalry there. I think that the political tensions between the two countries can be exaggerated. They’re still on the same page on all the major foreign-policy issues. But the relationship between the crown prince and the President of the U.A.E., Mohammed bin Zayed, isn’t as close as it used to be. That used to be kind of a mentor-mentee relationship between the older M.B.Z. and the younger M.B.S.

Touching.

Yeah. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. Machiavelli once said that if you want to attach someone’s interest to yours, you should let them do favors for you, because if you do favors for them eventually they’ll resent you. And there might be a little bit of that in the personal relationship between M.B.S. and M.B.Z., who was the guy who basically introduced Jared Kushner to M.B.S. He wanted to promote M.B.S. in the Saudi succession line. Remember when Trump came to Saudi Arabia in 2017, M.B.S. was not the crown prince. His cousin Muhammad bin Nayef was crown prince. M.B.Z. was a big element in promoting M.B.S.’s rise. That can lead to resentments.

When you think about the next three years of the Trump Administration and the relationship with Saudi Arabia, what are you looking at? I am also curious to hear you reflect on these dynamics now that, as you said, so much of this seems driven by personal financial dealings as much as by geopolitics.

I think the Trump Administration is unusual and an aberration in the history of the United States in terms of how it mixes personal finance with foreign policy. My hope as an American citizen is that this is truly an aberration, and we’ll go back to the separation of personal wealth from foreign-policy decisions. That being said, the Trump Administration’s close relationship with Saudi Arabia is not all that unusual. Many American administrations in the past have had this kind of close relationship with Saudi Arabia. The thing that I’m looking at as a real indicator from this meeting is whether it results in an agreement on nuclear infrastructure, because the United States has had a very strong position that it is not going to support the development in Saudi Arabia of a civilian nuclear infrastructure that includes enrichment of uranium. That was clearly the position vis-à-vis the United Arab Emirates. If the Trump Administration is willing to compromise that in a new nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, and to support the development of a Saudi civilian nuclear infrastructure that includes significant capability of uranium enrichment, that would be a really significant change in American nonproliferation policy. That’s something where I’m really anxious to see what happens. ♦

In March, 2022, the people living in Lakeside Park Estates mobile-home park, in Hollywood, Florida, learned that they were being evicted. The park’s owner, Trinity Broadcasting Network, had decided to shut it down. In many cases, tenants owned their homes, but they didn’t own the land they sat on. The residents—most of whom were low-income, many of whom were elderly—had until the end of the year to figure out where to go next. “Last Days on Lake Trinity,” Charlotte Cooley’s patient yet enraging short film, follows three women—Nancy Sanderson, Nancy Fleishman, and Laurie Laney—as they navigate the subsequent months of uncertainty and upheaval. It’s an intimate portrait of the downstream effects of corporate greed and the housing crisis, made more acute by the fact that the landlord in this case is the largest religious-television network in the world.

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Early in Cooley’s film, one of her subjects invokes a common stereotype of trailer parks—that they are trashy places filled with trashy people. The film, which is lit by soft seaside light, paints a different picture: residents tend their small yards, ride bikes with their friends, and watch ibises fly low over a lake. For Laney, a free spirit with long hair, the park signifies independence; she scoffs at her evicted neighbors who opt to move into condos. For Sanderson, a sweet-natured woman who struggles with her memory, the park is a source of care and community, and somewhere her friends can keep an eye on her. Fleishman worked for Trinity on and off for two decades; now the company she credits with saving her soul is putting her out. “They said they were going to help us relocate and they haven’t,” she says. “And when I call them for assistance they don’t respond.”

The spectre of homelessness looms as the women petition Hollywood’s city council for help and get quotes for apartments they can’t afford. They remain remarkably hopeful in the face of setbacks; you get the sense that this is not the first time these women have faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. “Maybe I’ll love it,” Sanderson, who is facing a potential move to Pennsylvania, says. “Being in the snow, making a snowman.” But her eyes betray her fear at leaving behind her routines and relationships; one of the great sadnesses of the film is watching Sanderson’s bright smile dim as the months progress and her options for escape narrow. The three women’s struggles stand in for a much larger problem: the housing-affordability crisis has been particularly hard on older Americans—people older than fifty are the fastest-growing unhoused age group.

As the months tick by, demolition crews crowd the park and Laney sells most of what she owns at a swap meet. She tells Cooley about a dream she had, months earlier, about a ficus tree. “All these branches with all these leaves and all these birds had been cut off,” she said. “All the branches and fingers of life were gone.” She woke up from the nightmare in a sweat. That day, the eviction notice arrived.